Revolutionary seizure of power by the people and transformation of state and society in the direction of a more just order is as old as the emergence of class in mankind's early history. If the primitive revolution in cultivation (agriculture) and its concomitant emergence of private property evolved in the parts of the world we know as Europe into a slave owning mode of production, in other parts of the world it displayed a different form of state and society, later dubbed the Asiatic mode of production. Whereas the former found its highest expression in the Greek and Roman empires, the latter gave rise to the civilisations of China and the Subcontinent, amongst others.
Slave owning empires experienced repeated rebellions, the largest and most spectacular one being that led by the slave-gladiator Spartacus, that all but overthrew the Roman Empire. In the Asiatic mode, the picture that emerges is more mixed and varied. This mode of production can essentially be understood as the state controlling water works (and thereby agriculture) and exacting tribute from the toiling peasants to finance its departments of administration and war. In China, this mode developed the peculiarity of repeated peasant revolts and rebellions against the owners of land and extractors of tribute for themselves and the Emperor. In the Subcontinent however, such rebellions were rare and peripheral. The relative stability of the Subcontinent's Asiatic mode compared to China's is a vast subject beyond the scope of this piece, but needs to be noted.
The dissolution of the Roman Empire at the hands of 'barbarian' tribes from largely the Teutonic north plunged Europe into the dark Middle Ages, during which time classical feudalism emerged as the successor order to slavery. In the Asiatic mode however, if China and the Subcontinent are taken as leading examples, the system persisted well into modern times. That is the main reason why the colonial encounter between a Europe that had embarked upon the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment and Renaissance and parts of the world still stuck in pre-capitalist mode proved so unequal and devastating for the latter.
The Industrial Revolution inadvertently set into motion phenomena hitherto unknown in human history. Perhaps the most important of these was the freeing of the new mode of factory production from the traditional location of naturally occurring energy (flowing water being the chief source) to anywhere with the induction of fossil fuels as the energy source (coal, later oil). Since places of manufacture (factories) now no longer needed to depend on naturally occurring sources of energy, they tended to be concentrated in or near the towns and cities, offering advantages of transportation infrastructure, etc. This concentration of the workplace spawned in turn the concentration of workers drawn from the scattered peasantry into densely populated workplaces and towns/cities. The conditions of work and life this new system imposed on the newly emerging working class evoked resistance on the latter's part against this inhumane, oppressive system. The first manifestations of this resistance were irrational, atavistic, tending to blame the machines the workers toiled at for long hours as their enemy. This gave rise to the Luddite movement, which attacked and smashed machinery. But soon this atavistic urge revealed its mistaken target and negative fallout in the shape of the unemployment that followed in the wake of smashing machinery. This is the tipping point between this primitive reaction to the new system of capitalism and the modern trade union consciousness that replaced it. From this platform, the working class began to organise in defence of its interests and for reform of the conditions and terms of work and life.
At this stage, the working class proved capable of joining and providing the radical wing of bourgeois democratic revolutions (anti-monarchy, anti-feudal). This is observable in the spate of revolutions that broke out in 1848 almost throughout the continent of Europe. Each of these revolutions however, proved short-lived and was crushed. A dark reign of oppression descended, forcing revolutionary thinkers and activists such as Karl Marx to adopt self-exile from his native Germany, first in France, later and permanently in Britain. There in London he was fated to spend the rest of his days writing his magnum opus Capital and remaining engaged with revolutionary movements in the period of defeat, retreat and exhaustion after the 1848 setback and the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1870 (this was the first proletarian seizure of partial power in human history). Although Marx did not live to see a successful revolution, within 34 years of his passing away in 1883, his ideas inspired the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Marx's follower and leader of the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) updated Marx's theories in the light of the changes capitalism had undergone in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He brilliantly applied these advanced theories to the concrete circumstances Russia and the world was passing through in the early 20th century. Lenin's contributions are so many, in thought and practice, but some stand out as critical for bringing about the Russian Revolution and setting it on its forward march.
First and foremost, Lenin analytically drew from the incremental concentration and monopolisation of capital by big corporations, export of capital to the enslaved colonies as a source of enhanced extraction of profits, uneven character of the development of the system due to these and other factors, and the virtual inevitability of a war of contention between the older, more developed capitalist states and late emerging capitalist powers to grasp the opportunity for the revolution's advance. Russia's crisis during WWI proved the trigger for the anti-monarchy February Revolution of 1917. While most Marxists relied on the received wisdom that Russia was still too backward for a socialist advance, Lenin was convinced the time to strike while the iron was hot had arrived.
The October seizure of power by the Bolsheviks was not, as some commentators like to describe it, a coup. It was the seizure of power through a protracted process of contention between a feeble and ineffective Provisional Government that had been thrown up by the February Revolution and the Soviets (councils) of soldiers, workers and peasants that challenged the Provisional Government with the popular slogan of "Land, bread, peace" (this contention has been described as the period of 'dual power'). The declaration by Lenin of a socialist order after the October seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, leading the Soviets, triggered the military intervention by the troops of 22 capitalist states in support of the overthrown monarchist, feudal forces. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Soviet Union for short, proved victorious in this resistance/civil war.
What happened subsequently, including, it must be noted, the defeat of Hitler in WWII by the Soviet Union (virtually singlehanded), needs more space than this column permits. Suffice it to say that a beleaguered first socialist state survived capitalist and fascist attempts to strangle it and the revolution. The fact that in subsequent years it succumbed to its internal contradictions and collapsed takes nothing away from its achievements in uplifting its people by providing universal education and healthcare, providing rights to the mosaic of nationalities the Soviet Union inherited from Czarist Russia, and providing a role model and support for revolutionary, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist movements worldwide.
Marxism, socialism, revolution are neither passé nor dead. The hiatus post-1991 is a period in which the revolutionary forces have licked their wounds and sought paths to their resurgence in a difficult climate worldwide. That resurgence is embryonically visible in the green shoots of resistance and rebellion against a now globalised, exploitative, inherently unequal and therefore repressive system of capitalism.
Lenin once said either revolution will stop war or war will lead to revolution. The latter half was demonstrated in 1917. The former half is the task for revolutionaries in 2017, armed with advanced knowledge and theory regarding the shape of 21st century capitalism. Judging by the wars unleashed by a rapacious and ruthless capitalism since the Cold War, the choice once again before mankind has come full circle to the question: socialism or barbarism?
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Copyright Business Recorder, 2017